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So what's the price and how powerful those processors are?If they come with right chipset those would be brilliant for HTPCs and quite powerful embedded devices (no fans!). Problem with Atom is that almost universally it comes with very crappy chipset/GPU which limits it's usage considerably. Since that is AMD they can use ATI integrated GPUs which can lead to some impressive performance.

I didn't look at individual pricing, but the AMD Turion Neo X2 L625 is alread being offered in a laptop from HP [hp.com] - listed at a base of $569.99 but the processor is a $75 upgrade... or so you think, as soon as you select it you are told you need to upgrade the video card as well!

Either way, they wasted no time getting this on the market. The price seems competetive with the Intel Atom model.

Always has been that way. Hopefully AMD will in turn one up Intel again, and the competition thrives. I remember back in the days of the K6-2 series of processors when an AMD chip never beat an Intel chip at anything other than price. You bought AMD not for any performance reason but because it was "good enough" and cost half of what an Intel chip did. It's great that AMD eventually reached a point when they DID beat Intel on price AND performance for a while. I know they've been slipping some, but I hope they keep it up.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no fanboy (I've got 5 machines right now - a Linux box, a Mac, and a Windows laptop, all running Intel chips, and a HTPC and my Windows desktop running AMD chips, so I actually have more Intel than AMD at the moment), but I really do hope that AMD survives, if only to keep Intel in check. Their prices are also still very competitive. I'm looking at replacing the aging Celeron 2.66Ghz chip in my Linux machine, and figured I'd like to go quad-core on it (it's my only remaining single core machine). Cheapest Intel Quad Core? $160. Cheapest AMD Quad Core? $80. It's a tad slower, but as a bonus the AMD chip burns about 30% less power as well. Looks like it's gonna be an AMD for that machine.

The thing that swings me in AMD's direction each time I put together a computer is that the MB and AMD CPU together are comparable for performance at a lower price point than the Intel chip and its MB.

thats a good point and the reason AMD is very competitive in developing world. But the fact that makes me go AMD is socket compatibility, I can replace a Phenom 8650 with a Phenom II 720BE on an AM2+ board, and both CPU would cost me almost the same: 8650 @ $170 8 months ago vs. 720BE @ $190 now, I can sell the 8650 for about $120 now and bump the RAM or video card.Like a IBM's netvista PC, a DELL Trinitron CTR, an nVidia 4XX series or a P3mobile laptop, AMD platform it's a trooper and I love trooper hardwa

I think it was always more of the "go with AMD for a good deal" than you paint it to be. For example K6-2 was actually very competitive with Celeron (slightly faster in int, slightly slower in float), K6-III even went head-to-head with top P3 at some point. The problem for them back then were mostly abysmal 3rd party chipsets & mobos, together with Intel being perceived as more solid (no doubt also due to chipsets...). Oh, and supply issues - you can't beat Intel fab capacity.

Except, that buying an Atom CPU without the intel chipset costs more than the bundle, then you add the cost of the ION platform chipset. Intel is really stacking the deck here. Not to mention, the next gen atom cpu will have a built in crappy chipset. I would probably pay $500-600 for a 10" laptop or htpc (for a hundred less) with enough gpu to push out 1080p video with enough overhead left for antivirus software.

I'm currently running an Eee PC 1000H, with a 500gb hdd, and 2gb of ram. The only things th

Low-power chips are great for low-load servers. I bought a cheap-o Atom nettop, no bigger than a DVD player, slapped a 2TB disk in, and installed Linux. Bam--instant offsite rsync server for my backups. The whole system uses less power than a lightbulb, makes almost no noise, and has a fanless CPU!

It may not be right for a high-load AJAX web app platform or for an HTPC, but the low power chips are more than enough for sufficiently responsive linux+ssh server.

Yup, I'm looking for a low-power 64-bit chip for a home NAS. ZFS performance is much better with a 64-bit CPU (partially due to the fact it likes having a lot of kernel address space, partly because it's very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic), which eliminates the Via chips and the low-end Atoms from consideration. The power usage is much too high for a portable (21W total? What is this, 2002?) but for a low power non-portable it's quite reasonable. It will be interesting to see how it scales down when the ma

VIA Nano is 64-bit. Dunno how its price/performance/power compares to an undervolted desktop CPU or cheap laptop CPU. It's definitely faster, more power hungry and more expensive than an Atom. But like the Atom, it's also definitely available in Mini-ITX.

ZFS performance is much better with a 64-bit CPU (partially due to the fact it likes having a lot of kernel address space, partly because it's very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic), which eliminates the Via chips and the low-end Atoms from consideration.

Desktop Atoms are 64-bit. I don't think you can buy a desktop motherboard with a low-end mobile Atom, which are the 32-bit chips.

Here's a tip for you, son. Whenever you need to find out something, you may want to take a look at these interesting websites, for starters: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] or Google [google.com.br]. Sometimes these websites have information for you. Now go on and give it a try. What's a goatse?

nettops are smaller and slower than laptops so when you surf the Internet you can only stay on top, I know they should have called them internettops but nettops rolls off the tong a little easier. If you spend any time on undernet you may have issues with a nettop.
nettops can be known to be dangerous since onthe top of the net it's harder to choose the tube you want to use since not all the openings of the tubes are on the top.
good for some, not for others...

Yup. I've had my home server/access-point/router/stereo/whatever running on a K6-2 for years, now. The only time I notice it's slow is when aptitude takes its time reading or updating its database. Even an Atom would be a massive speed upgrade, but I just don't need it.

I notice on AMD's PDF (linked in summary) that they list some of their envisioned uses. Why would someone need a modern 64 bit system for a point of sale system? Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper? I don't understand why some seemingly rather simple applications would require a large amount of processing power.

And so very true, AMD hasn't funded a completely new processor architecture in years. They really should think about doing so if they want to stay relevant, because low-voltage chips are a low-volume solution that doesn't make them any money (only select dies can handle the low voltage, and the larger die area compared to Atom means a lot less profit).

I don't really get the point of powerful CPUs for single-tasking either. For example, my local library has a machine with a Pentium Dual-Core to simply have a web browser open to their card catalog intranet. And other more powerful computers behind the desks (Core 2 quads!), I suppose the reasoning is it keeps the machine up-to-date for any new changes, but really, a Pentium III is more than sufficent to run the low-powered stuff that they are running, even buying a few used P4 boxes are a bit of overkill,

I went to my library expecting the same. Turns out they must have the equivalent of a Linux Genius there. They have 5-10 computers running off of a single quad core machine. All you can do is browse the internets and the card catalog, but everything is setup with 10 keyboards and 10 monitors and 1 CPU.

> They have 5-10 computers running off of a single quad core machine.> All you can do is browse the internets and the card catalog, but everything> is setup with 10 keyboards and 10 monitors and 1 CPU.

How do the keyboards, monitors and presumably mice connect to the one machine?

But one of the users would install all sorts of malware and viruses. My highly trained (MSCE A+) technician tells me it's impossible to build an operating system which is immune to infection. He also told me Ubuntu had a higher total cost of ownership than Microsoft Vista XP 7 and doesn't support industry standards properly.

This might be because of grants that were given to them where they could only spend it on computers and not on books. I know of a couple of libraries where they get a grant each year specificly to pay for computer equipment.

Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper?

.

Maybe, but not by much - reports [tgdaily.com] suggest the Atom costs less than $10 to manufacture. At that price any savings between processor types is pretty tiny unless you're deploying a vast number of them.

There's so much x86 development though, I'd imagine x86, and especially windows programmers, are much easier to find and cost less to hire. The processor cost in a POS system is going to be a tiny fraction of the total when you add in touch screens, bar code scanners, cash drawers, scales etc etc.

From the manufacturer's point of view it can probably develop software faster and cheaper using.net and it's that saving that probably drives lots of x86 uptake in these sorts of devices.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Never realized that POS systems are multi-thousand dollar machines (as I learned from my morbid curiosity about the following post). They appear so simple at first glance.

Indeed, developing for wintel using somethign like C#, delphi, VB (either classic or.net) or java is going to be a lot easier and more plesent than developing for an embedded platform. Even lintel is likely to be easier to work with than say linux on arm.

Linux on arm is a possibility but the state of floating point (you pretty much have to use a distro specialised to your particular hardware if you want decent floating point performance) and java (yes some arms have built in java support but accessing it i

Most ARM chips these days have VFP and NEON extensions, so FPU performance isn't much of a problem. The only time you get serious performance issues is when you have a chip with no FPU and try to run code that requires one. In this case, every floating point operation (including loads to floating point registers and stores to floating point registers, which happened a lot with the old ARM Linux ABI which passed floating point values in registers) traps to the kernel, which emulates the instruction. If yo

There are also a huge number of embedded developers, developing apps for phones and other embedded devices which often use ARM processors...

Putting windows on a POS device is actually a pretty dumb idea...

An Atom might cost $10 to manufacture, but how much does it cost to buy?If you use windows, how much does that cost for every device?How about any additional software you need on every device, eg AV?The increased cost of rolling out updates, because windows includes a lot of features which serve no purpose

Blame software. If you look around, a surprising number of POS systems are running some sort of XP embedded + POS graphical bloatware combination. (Dell's offerings [dell.com] in the area are more or less representative, if you are morbidly curious). Obviously, POS functions could be(and were) done on seriously weedly embedded hardware. Trouble is, if your business is already running quickbooks or something, and they want their cash register to integrate, the path of least resistance is to buy quickbooks' cash register product, which is a giant pile of bloat that only runs on full systems. On a global scale, you'd probably save money by rebuilding it to run on embedded ARM or something; but any individual economic actor is better off just buying a (still shockingly cheap) general purpose X86.

You still don't need 64 bits for that; but all of AMD's designs(aside from some of their old Geode gear, and maybe embedded products based on Athlon XPs, if you can still buy those) are based on Athlon 64 cores, and they would save essentially nothing by disabling 64 bit capability, and might lose in certain applications that do require 64 bit support, so they might as well ship with it.

Ummm, you do realize that hardware is always the least expensive part of any computing solution, right?

Even super-computers with million-dollar hardware costs are nothing compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent on the design and implimentation of that same system. As you scale down the application, the disparity between hardware and labor only increases. Case and point - a $1500 POS system costs less than it costs to employ the teenager operating it for minimum wage in just over one month. Forg

A super computer is also a low volume product. The more of something you sell, the more the incremental costs matter. Let's say you sell a $1500 POS system that cost a half million to develop and costs about $500 to build. Sell a thousand and your hardware and labor costs are about even. Sell ten thousand and your development costs are an order of magnitude smaller than component costs.

The embedded market is known for its fondness of cheap hardware, and sticking to the status quo. For many years, DOS was a dominant O/S for Point of Sale applications. In recent years, Windows is getting more popular. Linux is a big portion of this market, because it is free, and has real-time extensions. You can control entire machine tools in real-time with Linux, implementing the servo-loops on a PC in software. You can even prototype embedded applications, like motor controllers, in real-time Linux

Does anyone know good ways to connect the embedded processor to a standard PC motherboard? RS-232 is becoming rare. Ethernet overwhelms the small processors with data. Any good embedded communication solutions for networked motor drive and control applications?USB can be an option provided you aren't too latency sensitive either directly into a microcontroller with USB support (e.g. the pic18f2455/2550/4455/4550 series) or through a USB uart chip.

There are plenty of inexpensive 32-bit embedded processors out there and even 64-bit ones, many with built-in Ethernet and I/O support that require few external components. Many also run Linux quite well.

There are numerous PowerQuicc (Power PC variants), MIPS, ARM and other processors out there which will work just fine. Many even have things like hardware encryption support and support multiple cores or threads.

For things like POS systems there's generally little reason to be stuck with 8-bit processors an

The 8 bit processors on the other hand tend to be pretty good at the low level stuff, PICs for example can toggle a pin on one clock cycle and read back how the hardware responded to that pin on the next, they are also prety cheap. So in embedded systems you often see a 16 or 32 bit main processor to do the real work and then one or more little 8 bit microcontrollers to do all the fiddly hardware stuff that the main processor doesn't want to be bothered with. This design also may make the software easier as

Actually some of these 32-bit processors are pretty easy to design hardware around, and many also contain the I/O pins for low-level stuff as well, usually in the form of programmable GPIO lines. A POS system would typically have several peripherals such as a credit card reader, a scanner, a printer for receipts, a display and a method of opening the cash drawer and maybe a scale. Most of these interfaces use something like serial or USB, though a touch screen display might also require a cheap graphics chi

There are plenty of USB RS232 converters around.If you are using vista you may want to take some care though. The drivers of the last one I tried crashed the vista install so hard the computer had to be reinstalled and this was on a freshly installed vista.

Any good embedded communication solutions for networked motor drive and control applications?

CAN. Many motor control chips have a CAN controller built in. Serial works too, but may be slower (or not). Then there are chips that handle USB, but I haven't seem a motion control chip with that, so you're looking at a 2 chip solution there - but really fast communication.

As for fabrication, I believe TI is also at the 45nm node and they have ARM cores on a number of parts. The funny thing about Linux is that a

I'm not sure IBM Mainframe's count as POS systems. However, you are correct in that large numbers of these applications are terminal applications running on a mainframe. At first, dedicated terminals were used. Then, they switched to DOS based PCs. My bank has used both OS/2 and Windows based PCs more recently. Still the same green screen applications, however now some of them have better user interfaces.

I think it really depends on your approach. If you look at it like an embedded systems person, yo

Modern point of sale system are trending toward the web app model. An "embedded" chip fast enough to run some curses app won't cut it. An app needs to be fast enough to run a browser and with javascript.

The guts of an iphone, stuck in the back of a small flatscreen monitor would do just fine...Modern javascript interpreters are much faster than old ones, and modern embedded hardware is more than capable of running a web browser.

You want the least hardware possible, to use very little power and have very little to go wrong.

No way. You don't want to have customers waiting in line as you wait for the iPhone CPU to render the display after you scroll the screen. And you *do* want to have enough extra processing power that you have the potential to run more sophisticated web apps available in the future.

Most point-of-sale systems I have seen run Windows XP underneath the POS program. You would need an x86 CPU far more powerful than the MC68000 to run such a setup. Yes, a 68k would be more than enough if you hand-coded a simple but functional POS system for that hardware. POS makers want easy rather than efficient, so they slap together their frontend on Visual Basic and then make the register run Windows XP on a relatively powerful CPU to make up for their programming laziness. AMD's CPU would be a good fi

Compared to the common Atom + 945, AMD's new offering should(assuming it is reasonably priced) absolutely murder the Atom. The atom itself is a pretty low power chip(albeit slower than any A64); but the 945 is a nasty power hog, and has lousy 3D performance. An A64 and Radeon IGP in the same power envelope is hardly even fair, no contest, game over.

On the other hand, intel also has a low power atom chipset, with the "GMA500" they licenced from PowerVR. That particular combination will be weaker than this AMD offering; but it'll come in at something like 25% of the power draw.

This should, assuming it can score enough design wins to actually be buyable in a form other than trays of 1,000, be excellent competition for the Atom+945(being substantially more powerful, in the same thermal envelope), should be quite competitive with Atom+Ion(GPU performance will likely be a wash, CPU performance will be better, power envelope similar); but it won't have much effect on Atom+GMA500(substantially faster; but markedly higher power draw will keep it out of the smaller devices).

I'd love to see these show up in mini desktop systems, or the new thin and light slightly-larger-than-netbook laptops that are showing up.

Intel's next iteration for atom called 'PINEVIEW' is going to have memory controller and GPU on the chip- it is easy to see why they didn't design a completely new chipset for a configuration that was falling off the roadmap. Don't forget too that Intel goes through a pretty strenuous validation cycle for their customers which the 945 has been through.

I am sure the next generation will address most of these power concerns and then AMD will be the one 'murdered'

In this case Intel is not being nice. They will only sell Atoms for very restricted configurations (MUST use our chipset, can't have a PCIe slot, etc). Non-approved configurations pay 200% more, for less: the CPU without the chipset.

And you are "murdering" the ONE company (right now) that can compete with them and make Intel do The Right Thing (C)?

Intel is a nice company, but they are drawn, more and more, to the dark side of monopoly. It's so close they can feel it:-)

Intel's netbook Atoms run at 2.5W/11.8W right now -- already beating them out for power usage. Because of how important battery life is to netbook users, I don't think this has much hope of competing there. Intel does have other higher-power Atom CPUs that aren't meant for netbooks, so maybe that's the market AMD is going for. I'd be curious to see how large that market is, though.

But do not forget the 945 chipset eats energy like there is no tomorrow, so combine Atom (~4W)+ 945 (~24W) and then compare to AMD + AMD Chipset and they end like almost same (even favoring AMD a bit) power envelope but AMD will be much more powerful. 945GC eats a little less but only because better idle control.

Even Intel acknowledges it and is using a new chipset will far less consumption, but still with very weak video.

ION plataform is powerful with video but eats almost same power than 945 chipset.

Performance does count for something, even on netbooks. The current Atom-based netbooks can't play 1080p video usably, not are they up to any kind of 3d usage at all. Some netbooks are actually being offered with an optional HD video accelerator (Broadcom Crystal HD Media Accelerator), at extra cost and power usage. That's the reason for the existence of the Ion platform also. Clearly some of people do think there's demand for netbooks capable of playing full HD video and baseline 3d apps, even at the cost

FTA: "Average power consumption of 3W or less while decoding multimedia or intense 3d graphics" (for chipset). Intel's 945m draws about 6 watts idle, so that's 3 watts extra the AMD processor can take and be at the same power levels.

Some things to consider:

- AMD gives the worst-case maximum power draw as TDP. Intel gives the "expected" power draw as "TDP". So AMD chips of the same TDP rating will use less power than Intel ones.

- AMD chips have been much better than Intel chips for low idle power for a lo

Okay, so the 18W number is "thermal design power"... sigh, another bloody spec.

Is this a typical spec that is used for comparison? I ask because I've been an electrical engineer for 15 years and, up until now, have done fine with "typical power consumption" (which is supposedly 3 W for this chip, compared to 7 W for the Intel Atom Z530) and "maximum power consumption", which is what you have to design the power supply around, lest the supply rails brown out.

Sigh... like they say: "A datasheet writer can get twice the performance out of a chip that an engineer can."

Okay, so the 18W number is "thermal design power"... sigh, another bloody spec.

Is this a typical spec that is used for comparison? I ask because I've been an electrical engineer for 15 years and, up until now, have done fine with "typical power consumption" (which is supposedly 3 W for this chip, compared to 7 W for the Intel Atom Z530) and "maximum power consumption", which is what you have to design the power supply around, lest the supply rails brown out.

Sigh... like they say: "A datasheet writer can get twice the performance out of a chip that an engineer can."

The Thermal Design Power is the spec for the cooling system -- so relax, it's the Mechanical Engineer's problem, we don't do thermo.

What AMD means with "All of AMD's embedded products are offered with industry-standard 5-year component longevity." is that the compontents should last for at least 5 years untill they fail, so you can then buy something new afterwards. Yes; industry-wide predictable failure. Everything is designed to break after 5 years so you have to rebuy! Even if you are not in the market for a faster computer.

Maybe you can take your tinfoil hat off an recognize that this is a common engineering convention.How many times do you hear about a NASA mission that goes beyond it's failure window? AMD is simply defining the failure window for the chip. Of course they can and will last longer.

No. It means that they will continue to offer this CPU for 5 years so that embedded designers will still be able to design products around this chip and have some sort of guarantee the chip will be around long enough for that product to hit the market.

What do you mean by "true 64-bit processor" or "32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions?" A CPU is either a 32-bit CPU (can only use at most 32-bit instruction words) or it is a 64-bit CPU (can use 64-bit instruction words). The CPU in question is based on the AMD Athlon 64, which was the original x86_64 CPU. These CPUs can execute 16, 32, or 64-bit code, depending on the OS that is installed. If it's running a 64-bit OS, the CPU runs in 64-bit mode, where is uses 64-bit instruction words. I would say it as

All AMD has to do to kill the Atom is to not impose asinine restrictions (e.g. screen size <11.7") on its usage. It's as simple as that. Do that, and you will kill a good piece of the much more expensive Core 2 Duo market as well since that's what Intel is trying to foist off on the anything-larger-than-what-we-define-as-a-netbook market.

It doesn't matter. The important restrictions come from Microsoft, not Intel. If you want the $15 OEM licenses for XP, you need under 1GB of RAM, less than 160GB HDD or 32GB SSD, and a single-core processor under 1GHz (with some specific exemptions for certain models, including most Atom chips). For Windows 7, the CPU restriction is a single-core CPU under 2GHz. The screen size for XP can't exceed 12.1", but Windows 7 restricts this to 10.2". If your specs exceed this then you have to pay the full pric

This amounts to tying. If you have evidence to support your assertion __PLEASE__ send it to the Head of Anti-Trust at the DOJ and Frau Nellie Kroes at the EEC Commision, in Brussels, Belgium (http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/kroes/index_en.html).

It doesn't amount to tying at all. There is nothing stopping you -even if you are in a monopoly position - from pricing your product competitively. They are not tying it to any of their other products, they are simply offering a cheaper version that is only licensed to run on certain types of hardware. They identified that the market value of an operating system for netbooks was lower than the market value of an operating system for laptops or desktops (as shown by the fact that companies were shipping L

Not sure if they're shipping yet, but Always Innovating are due to be launching their TouchBook (OMAP3530) about now, Pegatron have a couple of i.MX515 devices lined up to ship before the end of the year, and a couple of other companies are following suit. There are also a few Chinese manufacturers shipping MIPS-based laptops, which are cheap but not particularly compelling next to Atom.

Intels Atom is all the way down to 1w, but might be paired up with a 20W chipset with most of that consumption being memory controller. So if AMDs new chipset is 3w, and obviously the memory controller is on-die, I'm starting to wonder if it is the DDR(2/3) memory controller that is the problem getting an x86 platform down to lower power consumption?

Assuming you're half the Linux fanatic you're coming off as, I'm sure you already know that no one has more open documentation than AMD/ATI. Hell their open documentation and support is pretty much keeping them alive on Linux, seeing how their drivers are still inferior to those of nvidia. So because they didn't have an entire article promising to do what they're already doing, you're complaining?

TFA is talking about an embedded CPU. Last time I checked EXA and OpenGL are graphics-related, V4L2 is for video devices and GStreamer is a cross-platform multimedia framework that talks to hardware via plugins for alsa, oss or whatever it is that OSX uses. These CPU's shouldn't "support" any of this stuff. If you are referring to the chipset these chips will be used with, they already support EXA and OpenGL with both the proprietary and oss drivers. The onboard sound has also been supported by ALSA for